GreatFire Newsletter - April, 2012

April was an eventful month in China. Here's a summary of the most important Internet censorship news that we detected.

No major changes after Internet outage on April 12

There was an extraordinary Internet outage in China on April 12. Many reported that all foreign websites were unaccessible for about two hours. Our data confirms that several websites that are otherwise not blocked were not accessible, but interestingly other foreign websites were still available. For more info on what happened, check out our answer on Quora. Some people suggested that the authorities were trying out a new version of the Great Firewall, which would be more restrictive than before. Our data does not support this claim. As you can see in the first graph below, there has not been any major change in the number of major websites that are blocked in China. Furthermore, the second graph shows that foreign websites were actually faster to access in April than during previous months.

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Showing Alexa Top 500 websites blocked 50% or more of the time, per month. Source.

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Showing average download speed of Alexa Top 500 websites not hosted in China, per month. Source.

Google Drive and the ongoing Google vs CCP battle

Google Drive was launched on April 24. Within three days, it was blocked in China. This is similar to Google Plus which was launched on June 28 last year, and confirmed to be blocked since July 4. It is likely that the Great Firewall has a special team dedicated to monitoring and blocking new Google services. They are probably keen not to repeat the mistake of Google Mail which was left unblocked and, meanwhile, switched over to encrypted communications only (meaning that email content can't be intercepted). The authorites would probably like to block it. The only reason we can see that they don't is that they're afraid of the reactions because so many (especially educated, big-city people) are already using it.

YouTube fully blocked again

The encrypted version of YouTube - https://www.youtube.com - was accessible in China for several days in March. Since March 29, though, it has been fully blocked again, suggesting that the Great Firewall is now better at blocking encrypted websites. HTTPS makes online censorship more difficult in that intercepting network devices don't know what the web traffic is. So while a web request to http://www.youtube.com can be blocked simply by detecting that the user is trying to access a blacklisted URL, a request to https://www.youtube.com can only be hindered by either blocking the IP address of the server or by DNS poisoning the domain lookup. The former is difficult because IP addresses tend to change over time, and the latter is imperfect because it's decentralized and easier to get around than other forms of censorship. For example, the encrypted YouTube URL was tested eight times during April. Five different IP addresses were returned on the different test occasions. Only on three of the occasions was a completely different IP address returned (suggesting DNS Poisoning). On all eight test ocassions though, the website was blocked. This suggests that the Great Firewall is now either blocking ranges of IP addresses, or continuously monitoring changes in IP addresses and blocking them accordingly.

Blocked and unblocked on Sina Weibo

weibo: 王立军, the former Chongqing police chief who triggered the biggest political scandal in China in many years, was blocked on or before April 10 (but was not blocked on April 3). As part of the same scandal, weibo: heywood was blocked on or before April 14. weibo: 薄熙来 himself was blocked on or before April 10.

Other keywords were unblocked. weibo: 蔡赴朝, the name of a CCP politican, was unblocked on or before April 21. weibo: 女同 - lesbian - was unblocked on or before April 7.

You can lookup and test any keyword for censorship on Sina Weibo here. Also much recommended are BlockedOnWeibo, a blog which publishes frequent news on keywords blocked on Weibo, and WeiboScope, a database of deleted Weibo posts.

There are many ways to get around the Great Firewall of China: VPNs, proxies, Tor etc. Some of them cost money and some are free. They are all bound to be unreliable though because they depend on a server used to tunnel the web traffic in order to circumvent the censorship. If the IP address of the server being used is blocked, the service ceases to work. It can be fixed of course, by changing to another server, but meanwhile you may find yourself without any means of accessing blocked websites. Until now.

FanQiang@GreatFire.org is a circumvention tool that is very difficult to block. This is because it relies on email and not HTTP traffic. All you need to do is to send an email to FanQiang@GreatFire.org and enter the URL of the website that you want to view as the email subject. Within a few seconds (sometimes longer) you will receive a PDF version of the website.

For example, create a new email with the subject http://boxun.com and send it off to FanQiang@GreatFire.org. You will receive an updated PDF copy of that website - blocked in China - shortly thereafter.

It's not a perfect solution by any means. You can't log in to websites, such as Facebook, and you can't view videos. However, for those times when you simply want to view a blocked website and you have no other means, it's very convenient. All you need to remember is FanQiang@GreatFire.org.

Can you help us translate content into Chinese?

We are creating a Chinese version of GreatFire.org and we depend on volunteers to translate our content. Can you help out? Or do you know someone that can? Please contact us on greatfire@greatfire.org .

Tue, May 23, 2017

Last week Twitter came under attack from a DDoS attack orchestrated by the Chinese authorities. While such attacks are not uncommon for websites like Twitter, this one proved unusual. While the Chinese authorities use the Great Firewall to block harmful content from reaching its citizens, it now uses DDoS attacks to take down content that appears on websites beyond its borders. For the Chinese authorities, it is not simply good enough to “protect” the interests of Chinese citizens at home - in their view of cyber sovereignty, any content that might harm China’s interests must be removed, regardless of where the website is located.

And so last week the Chinese authorities determined that Twitter was the target. In particular, the authorities targeted the Twitter account for Guo Wengui (https://twitter.com/KwokMiles), the rebel billionaire who is slowly leaking information about corrupt Chinese government officials via his Twitter account and through his YouTube videos. Guo appeared to ramp up his whistle-blowing efforts last week and the Chinese authorities, in turn, ramped up theirs.

Mon, Dec 12, 2016

It’s been three years since Eric Schmidt proclaimed that Google would chart a course to ending online censorship within ten years. Now is a great time to check on Google’s progress, reassess the landscape, benchmark Google’s efforts against others who share the same goal, postulate on the China strategy and offer suggestions on how they might effectively move forward.

Flowers left outside Google China’s headquarters after its announcement it might leave the country in 2010. Photo: Wikicommons.

What has Google accomplished since November 2013?

The first thing they have accomplished is an entire rebranding of both Google (now Alphabet) and Google Ideas (now Jigsaw). Throughout this blog post, reference is made to both new and old company names.

Google has started to develop two main tools which they believe can help in the fight against censorship. Jigsaw’s DDoS protection service, Project Shield, is effectively preventing censorship-inspired DDoS attacks and recently helped to repel an attack on Brian Krebs’ blog. The service is similar to other anti-DDoS services developed by internet freedom champions and for-profit services like Cloudflare.

Thu, Nov 24, 2016

Facebook is considering launching a censorship tool that would enable the world’s biggest social network to “enter” the China market. Sadly, nobody will be surprised by anything that Mark Zuckerberg decides to do in order to enter the China market. With such low expectations, Facebook is poised to usurp Apple as China’s favorite foreign intelligence gathering partner. If the company launches in China using this strategy they will also successfully erase any bargaining power that other media organizations may hold with the Chinese authorities.

Tue, Jul 05, 2016

There is a commonly held belief in China that if you have a VPN that works then you should keep quiet about it. In terms of freedom of access to information, the problem with this approach is that access to knowledge suddenly is a secret. Today we are launching a project that we hope will destroy that model.

Our newest website, Circumvention Central (CC), aims to provide real-time information and data about circumvention solutions that work in China. Since 2011, we have been collecting data about blocked websites in China and now we will add data about the effectiveness of VPNs and other circumvention tools.

We are launching CC with four main objectives in mind.

Our first objective is to help to grow the number of Chinese who circumvent censorship restrictions in China. By sharing our information and data about these tools, we hope to show a wider audience which circumvention tools are working.

Our second objective is to improve the circumvention experience for users in China by bringing transparency to tool performance. We will measure these tools on speed (how quickly popular websites are loaded) and on stability (the extent to which popular websites load successfully).

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